A Thousand-year-old Toad.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 11, 15 September 1909, Page 60

A Thousand-year-old Toad.

Some time away back before Columbus discovered America a spadefoot toad sat croaking along the edge of a hillside. All at once there was an upheaval, a mighty earthquake, probably, and down, down went the toad, five hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. The croak he had begun under the stars he never finished. Instead, he squatted in a little pocket that had formed around him in the mud and silt in which he was buried, and went to sleep. Genturies went by, and the little chamber in which he lay became a cyst or pocket in a tremendous block of limestone that had formed itself slowly. Other geologic changes had taken place, too, and the little batrachian had been raised from his depth of five hundred feet to within one hundred and fifty

feet of the earth’s surface. The same pressure whieh had turned his surroundings into solid rock and had filled up his ancestral valley had done. this. More centuries went by, and then a miner, working in a silver shaft, blasting far underground, put a blast on the toad’s sepulchre. Blown to pieces was the limestone—and out of his cell was rolled the tond, blind, white with ages, but still alive—to be for a scientific age one of its chief enigmas and greatest marvels. Off to the Zoo in New York City, in a glass jar, with a little oxygen, in it, went the toad. There it cheered up sufficiently to eat a few flies, give a few ancient croaks, get some of its colour back, and then—it died. Too much freedom did it. For, although the toad of the ages could survive earthquake and dynamite blast and a few centuries of starving, liberty and the menus of the new age’ were too much for him. But Methuselah—that is what they christened him—had served his purpose.' He was blown out of the limestone to mystify science, upset a few cherished theories, and propound the as yet unanswered question—How did he live and how long did he live that way? There is a strange condition of life that is called one of suspended animation. In it all the vital forces are at their lowest ebb; waste and decay are at a minimum; there is a spark of life that persists, and apparently that is all.